Washed Ashore: Family, Fatherhood, and Finding Home on Martha's Vineyard

By Bill Eville

The story of a man coming into his own by coming home.

Since he was a boy, Bill Eville knew he wanted two things in life: to be a writer and a father. Being a minister’s husband had not been on this list, having left the church as a teenager as soon as his parents stopped making him go each Sunday.

In Washed Ashore, Eville’s life changes when his wife Cathlin takes a job as the first female pastor of a 350-year-old church on Martha’s Vineyard, the island that was once home to generations of his ancestors. With their two small children in tow, the couple begins a new life eight miles out at sea.

Readers follow Eville’s journey from stay-at-home-dad to newspaper editor as he discovers what it means to be a writer, a father, and—after his wife’s devasting breast cancer diagnosis—what it truly means to be a minister’s husband. Washed Ashore, told in a series of linked essays, is poignant and funny, filled with faith, struggle, and light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781567927399

Bill Eville

Bill Eville is the editor of the Vineyard Gazette, where his work has garnered numerous awards from the New England Newspaper & Press Association. He is a graduate of Princeton University and holds an MFA from Florida State University. His essays have appeared in print and on-air at venues such as The New York Times, This American Life, The Moth, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti. He lives on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and two children.

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Prologue

Not long after we were married, my wife Cathlin and I began reading Moby-Dick aloud to each other, a few chapters every evening before we went to bed. We taped each session: although we were young and still imagining our lives, we understood life was fleeting.

When Cathlin’s mother died, a few years before our wedding, Cathlin was stunned to realize that the only record of her mother’s voice was the outgoing message on the answering machine. And so our idea was that when one of us died, the other would have these tapes and we could be together again, our voices sailing slowly toward some island of solace aboard the Pequod with Ishmael and Ahab.

We were living on Martha’s Vineyard then, during the off-season. It was 2002, long before children came along, and we were in between things. Cathlin had just finished seminary and I had left the film business. We had come to the island in the solitude of the cold months to polish our résumés and work on our applications⁠—Cathlin to churches and I to graduate schools. We had also come to the island to help my grandmother in her final days.

My ancestors on my mother’s side came from a long line of Vineyarders, stretching back to the early 1700s. The Hardings were whalers, and when the whaling industry faltered, they became shopkeepers on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs. Later, my great-grandfather left the island to look for work and settled in New Jersey, where he raised a family and where I grew up.

My grandparents Bill and Ann Harding met at university in Pennsylvania, set up on a blind date while Ann was attending Moravian and Bill was across the river, at Lehigh. It didn’t take long for Bill to introduce his soon-to-be-bride to the Vineyard. Years later, my grandmother described that moment to me: Your grandfather brought me to this island and there were all these Harding women staring at me, wondering who the heck this skinny girl was, and how she was going to do. Well, I outlived them all. That’s how I did.

Gram was proud of her status as the last one standing. But there was a major downside to outliving everyone else of her generation: after she and my grandfather retired, they moved to the island full time to live out their days, and she eventually ended up alone in the old house during the long quiet winters, as the rest of the family lived on the mainland in New Jersey and New York. When we moved out to the Vineyard to be with my grandmother, the doctors didn’t know how much time she had⁠—Maybe a few months, maybe more, they said. So Cathlin and I set up shop a couple of blocks away in a house owned by a friend. We didn’t know it would be a test run for returning permanently in a few years.

I spent every summer of my life visiting my grandparents, but I had never lived on the island off-season. I took to it quickly, and so did Cathlin. Our routines were quickly established: I rose early and made the short, cold walk to Gram’s house, where I would write for two hours in the old storeroom that had been my bedroom as a child. When Gram woke, we would make coffee and toast and eat breakfast together. After the workday was done⁠—I found a job at a nursery and Cathlin did nonprofit consulting⁠—we all gathered at Gram’s for dinner.

During our meals, Cathlin and I would tell Gram about our days, where we traveled on the island, whom we met, what happened at work. If I close my eyes now, I can see the three of us talking. The light outside is gray and there’s a slight wind banging against the house. Gram’s chair is between Cathlin and me, and she turns from one of us to the other as we talk. I tell her about the four Nepalese guys who were just hired and are suffering terribly from the fall allergies they aren’t used to, and about a trucker from off-island who missed the last ferry and was shocked when I told him there were no strip clubs on the island. Gram nods and smiles and tells us stories, too, revealing her life in a way she never had before. She talks about growing up in Pennsylvania, about how poor she and my grandfather were when just starting out, but how happy they were, too. And one night she tells us about the day her eldest daughter died, at the age of twenty-eight.

I cried so hard and so much that I exhausted all my tears and never cried again, she says.

After washing the dinner dishes, Cathlin and I walk home. We don’t have children yet or a television or cell phones, so we take long walks in the evening, listen to the radio, and read. And at the end of the night we turn to Moby-Dick, the tape recorder gently whirring beneath our voices.

Gram died that spring, and not long after Cathlin and I packed up our Vineyard lives. The tapes of us reading Moby-Dick were put away in an old shoebox and over the years I carried them with me to each new home. When we returned to Martha’s Vineyard to raise our two children, I placed the worn box high on the top of a bookcase in our basement. I had never been moved to listen to them⁠—they were a time capsule waiting to be unearthed only in the advent of tragedy.

But eventually I began to wonder what Cathlin and I sounded like back then. And so one dark night not long ago, while my family slept, I pulled the shoebox down from its shelf. If this were a movie, the lid on the box would have creaked and the tapes would have appeared dusty. But nothing was out of the ordinary. I found a tape recorder, inserted a tape, and pressed play.

At first, what I heard was disappointing.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but our voices didn’t sound very different. I listened as we talked about who would begin reading and where we should place the recorder⁠—the situation felt almost mundane. My voice sounded annoying, too, and I fought the urge to click the tape off immediately and kept listening, alone in the quiet basement.

Finally, Cathlin took over the reading duties, and as Ishmael searched for a ship and was surprised in bed by Queequeg, I remembered the first time I brought Cathlin to the Vineyard. It was a bitterly cold weekend, but on the first day we walked from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown, the wind blowing so hard we had to take shelter behind a small dune. The next day we walked again in the cold from Oak Bluffs to Vineyard Haven, laughed at by the gulls, it seemed, but savoring every moment.

I saw all that again, and then my mind moved forward in time and I saw Cathlin lying in bed, weak from chemotherapy during her breast cancer treatment. I saw our son, Hardy, reading to her from his favorite book and our daughter, Pickle, lying in bed with her mother, buried deep under the covers and slowly caressing her ankles.

And then I was with Gram at her bedside when she could no longer walk. She floated in and out of consciousness. I was sitting beside her, lightly rubbing her face with the tips of my fingers as she once did for me on summer nights when I couldn’t sleep, and as my mother does now for my children.

All this I saw and more, so much more, as Ishmael led me out to sea just as my ancestors once led him.

1.

Cathlin’s church is located in the center of Martha’s Vineyard, anchoring the town of West Tisbury, about three miles from the parsonage where we live. To say town is to imply there is one, but along with the church there is only a library, town hall, gas station, post office, take-out restaurant, and general store. Otherwise, West Tisbury is fields and farms with a few roads and streams crisscrossing the land.

The First Congregational Church of West Tisbury is a traditional New England Congregational church: white weathered clapboards with green shutters, a tall steeple with a clock in the tower that is carefully wound by hand each month, and a large bell in the belfry that our daughter rings on Sundays by pulling down on a thick rope. At the very top of the church’s spire is a fish-shaped weather vane.

Inside, the church is quiet and bright, with light pouring through the windows. There are pews and Bibles and a large wooden cross behind the pulpit. There is an organ in the balcony, a piano up front. In an adjacent room, there is a kitchen where the church volunteers prepare coffee hour and in the winter cook community suppers for the homeless, the hungry, and the lonely.

Cathlin’s church is the sort of small rural church you might see on a postcard. A large rainbow flag hanging over the front door is the only sign that the 350-year-old church isn’t mired in a past century. And there is one more clue: on a back wall hangs a hand-painted list of all the pastors going back to when the church was first founded in 1651: Thomas, John, Experience, Nymphas . . . and then, in 2008, the first female name: Cathlin Baker.

For my family, the ritual of church doesn’t begin with Cathlin in the pulpit, guiding the congregation through the service. The ritual begins in the pews.

A very old islander once told me she had sat in the same pew since she was a little girl: third row, left side. That’s eighty years, she said. I should have a plaque on the pew but I don’t want to stand out. She’s a New Englander, proud but not flashy. And very tough. No matter my family’s island roots, in these things we are newcomers.

In early 2008, Cathlin applied for the job of solo pastor at the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury. She was forty-one at the time, chief of staff at Union Seminary in New York City and pregnant with our daughter, Eirene, whom everyone has always called Pickle. I was forty-four, a stay-at-home dad to Pickle and then-four-year-old Hardy. There was no way we could afford to live on Martha’s Vineyard, but the job came with free housing in the parsonage. Cathlin was offered the pastorship and that summer we moved out to sea, leaving behind New York City, our home for more than twenty years.

In seminary, Cathlin worked as an assistant pastor for a year, but guiding the First Congregational Church of West Tisbury was her first job leading a church by herself. She had been a hospice chaplain and on staff at Union Seminary, but those were jobs tangential to actually going to church each Sunday. The weekly rhythm of preparing a sermon and bringing the family to the pews was a new one for all of us.

Every Sunday, Cathlin left the house first and I followed, later, with the kids. We quickly became creatures of habit, sitting on the right side, about halfway back from the pulpit. Not too close, not too far away.

A kaleidoscope of the community filled the pews around us. The chief of police usually sat in front of me. Two pews over sat a woman who sold African crafts and put on puppet shows a few times a year. The high school principal and her family sat a few rows behind me, a musician drummed a beat with his fingers on the back of the pew next to me. In summer, famous people stopped by (and still do) and small-town life absorbed the wider world. When Bill Murray visits the church, he doesn’t sit in a pew. Instead, he walks upstairs to the choir loft.

The retirees were scattered here and there around the pews⁠—a former writer for Sports Illustrated, assorted executives who moved here, and islanders who had always lived here. The head of island hospice. The woman who ran the Alzheimer’s care unit at the nursing home. The very tall blind man, whose name I could never remember but who always sat up front⁠—right side, second pew⁠—and each Sunday during prayer time offered up the same three names. After he died, his children, who guided him to his seat, disappeared, too.

Alma Benson sat in front of me. She had worked at Cottle’s lumber yard until she was ninety-two years old. If I trace my Martha’s Vineyard family tree back far enough, I’m related to the Cottle family. But because we left the island in the mid-1950s, no one seems to know my family history, whereas the Cottles are considered a founding family. After Alma died, her niece Margaret, who always picked her up for church and sat next to her, continued to come every week, and later in the day I would often see her walking alone down one of the winding roads farther up-island.

In our pew, I kept Hardy occupied with coloring books and mazes with John the Baptist at the center of the twists and turns. I’d watch him as he traced a red line with his pen, making a few false starts, backtracking, and then finally giving up in frustration and marking a huge X over John the Baptist’s face. Pickle would sit in my lap and arrange her two stuffed animals, a small bear and a bunny, in a conversational circle to chat about how the morning was unfolding.

Hardy and I often played a drawing game. I would put a small squiggle down on the paper, essentially a line with a curve at the end, and hand the paper to Hardy, who would then try to create a picture out of the squiggle. He’d quickly turn it into a tree, then put his own squiggle down for me, and it was my turn to draw. We would go back and forth like this as the church filled up, a community of the faithful on a Sunday morning, with me and the kids looking more like preschool art class.

In those days, with our pew filled with stuffed animals, pencils and paper, Pickle’s security blanket, and Lego pieces, parishioners looked at me and smiled as they passed us: the minister’s husband at work keeping the kids happy. Not long after Hardy was born, I discovered that a man who publicly takes care of his children is put on a pedestal. A woman who does this is commonplace and noticed only if the kids act up. But for a man, just the attempt to parent publicly is viewed as a success, and a sort of superhero status is granted for no reason at all.

I also got a pass in my role as the minister’s husband. No one asked me to bake a pie or chair a committee or host a book group. But I knew that if I were the minister and Cathlin were sitting in the pew, taking care of the kids wouldn’t be seen as something special. Not only would she have to bake a lot of pies to measure up, but it would also probably be important for her to be religious. I was given a pass on that, too.

Cathlin, dressed in her black robe and colorful stole, would walk past us down the center aisle toward the front door to greet people as they arrived. She’d smile and Pickle would reach for her, but I held her back, whispering, Mommy is working. As I did this, I thought about how odd it was that I was essentially spending time at my spouse’s office with our kids in tow. What other couple had the same situation? And yet even though I tended to grumble every Sunday, once I was actually in the pew I didn’t mind at all.

After the service started, Hardy would go to Sunday School. If Pickle felt brave enough, she went, too. Then, for the next forty-five minutes I sat by myself, feeling for a moment like an adult and not just a parent. I would listen to the sermon and let my mind wander without being interrupted by the kids. A church service, with its hymns and prayers, sermon and the passing of the collection plate, seemed old-fashioned and out of sync with the rest of my life, but when I gave in to it, the rest of the world⁠—at least for a moment⁠—vanished.

My favorite part of Cathlin’s weekly service was when she asked the congregation to share their joys and concerns, openly or to themselves, and then for several minutes people spontaneously offered up the names of people they were praying for, those who were sick, dying, or struggling. People also spoke to the joy of a sunny day, their children visiting, birthdays, anniversaries, a friend seated with them in the pew. This moment of profound vulnerability never stops being meaningful for me.

After the voices stopped calling out their hopes and joys, their fears and sadness, Cathlin stepped back from the pulpit and sat down. A hush would envelop the church, holding each individual together for some long minutes. These were the moments when I felt like crying, as I sat there and breathed in my life and the lives of those around me.

My true feelings about church and religion are complicated. When my mother stopped making us go to church, I was a teenager and I thought that was the end of it. But then I fell in love with Cathlin, and eventually found myself in a small church on a small island every Sunday, not sure where my life was headed but believing strongly in this holy moment.

The silence was broken with a hymn, and then the lights were dimmed and Cathlin stepped back into the pulpit to deliver her sermon. In those early days I listened mostly as a husband scanning the room and hoping Cathlin was doing well. I also listened as an editor. By the time Cathlin delivered a sermon, I would have read it at least three times and given my feedback.

As part of our weekly routine, every Saturday I wandered the island with the kids in order to give Cathlin the time and space she needed to write. I complained about it, this burden on our every weekend, but when Cathlin texted me from wherever she was writing to say she had a draft and I went home and read her sermon, I was once again struck by the power of our ritual. No matter what else happened during the week, whether we sometimes felt like business managers planning the movements of our children, if we argued or were distant, or if we were too busy to sit and talk, we always had this one shared moment together.

After the sermon had been delivered and the hymns sung, I would slip from our pew, collect the children from Sunday School, and, when the weather was warm, walk them to the playground just across the street.

I had spent my boyhood summers